1.1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of electronic network computing and in particular to a method and respective system for providing updates of software products via the network, for example the Internet.
1.2. Description and Disadvantages of Prior Art
Many software vendors offer a website accessible via the Internet, on which different software updates or respective different products are offered to be downloaded by an interested user. In regard of the software vendors interests a download procedure expected to be performed by the interested user may be assumed to follow a consistent, logic. As this logic is the same for each of the offered products, or at least similar, the way to offer the software updates of the software products may be regarded as consistent. In view of a single user having installed only one product or several products of the same vendor this may be considered also as consistent and tolerable.
The software product administration of a larger enterprise, however, which manages the software updates of quite a lot of user applications is, however, quite complicated to do because until now different software vendors apply different procedures to offer their updates. One vendor for example defines a single download area for a single product, where the download files are presented in any reasonable order and arrangement, the other software vendor offers different web pages for different products, where the user is expected to go, and again another software vendor, see for example Adobe®, and the Adobe Reader®, portable document file viewer application, makes the application to look automatically at the vendor's website in order to check if a new software update is present, or not. Another software vendor may be assumed to ship any software update by post mail whereas a further vendor, e.g. Microsoft® establishes a dedicated download manager (Windows® update) which systematically checks the single components resident on a user's computer and provides respective software updates for each component basically transparent to the user.
In this case the user must trust that his system is still running after installation of the update, as this will be done automatically.
So, if an enterprise's software administration stuff must provide updates for tens or may be hundreds of different software applications, this is a quite complicated task which disadvantageously includes much manual work together with some experiences and extended IT-knowledge.
1.3. Objectives of the Invention
The objective of the present invention is to provide a more simple software updates download method which can additionally be run automatically without major manual interference, once some initial work has been done.